Wright Brothers' biographer talks about their passion and persistence

As David McCullough tells the story, it wasn't the Wright brothers; it was the Wright family. Wilbur was the genius. Orville was the fellow flyer, mechanic and entrepreneur. Sister Katharine was the glue that held the family together. The father, Bishop Milton Wright, was the preacher-patriarch who laid the foundation for it all.

In McCullough's new book, , he goes beyond the Wilbur and Orville story to document a family circle of four extraordinary people. In one sense, McCullough's task as a biographer was smooth. The Wright brothers, who invented and flew an aircraft for the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight, were indefatigable letter writers. They left an account of their adventures from Ohio to France and back.

In another sense it was not. The brothers, self-taught bicycle mechanics-turned-inventors, were not emotional fellows. Only in expressing the thrill of first flight did Wilbur ever describe transcendence. The brothers never married, and there was never a hint of a romantic involvement in their letters. They first achieved fame in France, and accounts of those triumphs were published in French. What they did have was focus, with a capital F, and McCullough's book is a case study in the concentrated energy of genius. The author, 81, talks to about the enigmatic Wright family.

I was working on my book ( ) about Americans in Paris in the 19th century. I didn't know when (chronologically) I was going to end that book, and who do I run into in France but the Wright brothers. I was delighted to find that Wilbur, at every chance, went to the Louvre to look at paintings, and the degree that he was moved by the great Gothic works of France was far beyond that of an ordinary tourist … It's important to convey now, when so many people are dismissing the liberal arts or skirting around them … [that] the Wright brothers, who accomplished one of the greatest technical achievements of all time, achieved what they did by reading widely and deeply. Much of what has been written about the Wright brothers [in French] has been ignored. That's what pulled me into doing the book.